But for true entrepreneurs, it’s often part of the process of getting where they want to go. That point was driven home Thursday evening when Innovate Pasadena awarded prizes in its “Epic Failures” competition.

The event was held to honors entrepreneurs who have grappled with failure, learned from the experience and bounced back with a high level of success.

That trajectory is nothing new.

Walt Disney was reportedly fired by a newspaper editor for lacking good ideas and having no imagination.

Well, we all know where his “no imagination” ideas ended up. Ironically, the people who help create Disney’s iconic theme park attractions today are called “imagineers.”

Thomas Edison is another great example. He tried more than 1,000 times to invent the light bulb before things finally clicked. When asked about his aborted attempts, he answered that he knew “definitively over 9,000 ways that an electric light bulb will not work.”

Great perspective. Turned it right around.

But getting back to Innovate Pasadena, CloudSponge won the People’s Choice Award. The software-as-a-service product provides an interface that allows users to easily import contacts from a variety of webmail services.

“We wasted a hundred grand, basically,” Gibb told the crowd. “We spent a hundred grand building something. We had no idea who was gonna’ buy it or how we were going to get it to people. So we looked at everything that we had built after we ran out of money and we found a future for the product we were building that we could sell.

“We put a price tag on it, put in on the website and now we’re a software-as-a-service business that’s got thousands of customers, including Yelp and Airbnb and a bunch of big names that your guys would recognize.”

Hank Leber, who snagged the Judges Winner Award, had an equally compelling story. He founded a social platform called GonnaBe that ended up draining nearly all of his resources.

“I left my advertising job, took a couple of my colleagues and we started an accelerator program that raised $250,000 over the course of a year,” he said. “I sold my car and exhausted my life savings to keep the thing going. And I wound up chasing a deal with Anheuser Busch that was supposed to be about a 600K deal.”

That failed to materialize. Meanwhile, two of Leber’s cofounders were hired by Snapchat and another social media company where they became “rich kids.”

“I had no car, no rent money and had to start from scratch,” Leber said. “I went to the very bottom. But then I consulted for a bit and now I have a company called Vytmn that helps companies grow on social media.

“We’re killing it. We’re nine months out with a 15-person team, making $100,000 a month in revenue. I wouldn’t have been able to do any of it without all of the failures of GonnaBe.”

Kevin Smith handles business news and editing for the Southern California News Group, which includes 11 newspapers, websites and social media channels. He covers everything from employment, technology and housing to retail, corporate mergers and business-based apps. Kevin often writes stories that highlight the local impact of trends occurring nationwide. And the focus is always to shed light on why those issues matter to readers in Southern California.

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